I’m curious as to why my lawn watered to 120% MAD this week. I had no precipitation, manual or fixed watering. I was just letting Flex Daily do its thing. Maybe it’s normal, but on the 31st there would have still been a positive moisture balance if no watering occurred. It fired anyway, and I ended up at 120%. Any guidance in understanding this would be appreciated.
Did you adjust your mad?
I saw this behavior when I adjusted the mad during beta testing and I was not a fan of this behavior
Do you have a watering restriction on the 1st?
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But flex should never ever change duration, just frequency. Increasing the duration just is not effective as it will either cause run off if you soil column is being watered correctly, or else your soil column is is not being watered completely so you should adjust your advanced zone settings.
But it was a good idea.
Did he say the duration changed? I can’t tell from the pic he posted, but I thought he just meant it ran on a day that it normally wouldn’t have and because of that it went over 100%. I could be wrong though.
Also I do see where @franz mentioned that when restrictions are in play, flex can modify the duration…
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Ok cool. Yea backing down the duration would make sense, increasing the duration is just completely pointless no matter which way you look at it
If duration didn’t change how would you push moisture that high?
The link you posted said that flex will water less, earlier if needed
Yea, good point. I didn’t think about that. Well I’m out of ideas then.
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Thanx for the article, I had either forgotten or didn’t know (probably ignorance) that flex would slide the duration backwards
@Brg468 @plainsane. No watering restrictions, and no MAD changes. In fact,I don’t recall even going into my lawn’s zone settings for the past couple of weeks. This was a schedule that I had setup prior to beta and prior to the 2.6 release, I believe without any changes since.
@Brg468, also thanks for the link. I now remember reading it but had totally forgotten about it. - I know that I am very lucky to not have watering restrictions – and even if we do go into restrictions, I get to skip the first two phases of them because I am in the Charlotte Mecklenburg Smart Irrigation program. One of the perks they give me for using the Rachio (thanks, Rachio!!! Love 'ya!!!).
@azdavidr, I can’t remember if you said you have restrictions. If you did have a restriction set to not be able to water on June 1, it makes total sense based on @franz article because your MAD would have gone below 0 on that day. (.42-.24 = .18 inches left, and you needed .30).
oops. We were both typing at the same time!!! So now I totally don’t get it either!
I went to make sure that a restriction wasn’t set accidentally. Is it set by the “Will Water” selection? If so it’s confirmed to be unrestricted. It just seems to me that the algorithm decided to water early, but I can’t imagine why?
At a loss
I remember now that on, I believe, May 24th I changed my soil type from Sandy Loam to Clay Loam. You can see that it overshot to 106% on the 25th. If figured it was just because of the change that the balance was thrown off for a day, but figured it would recover and stay inside the bucket for future watering. I wonder if the soil change somehow triggered a bug?
Just as an aside, had you changed the MAD from the default? One thing I don’t like is if I’ve set the MAD and then change the soil type, the MAD (and I think the efficiency) get set back to the defaults, and you don’t know unless you go back in and look at them.
@Linn. Thanks for the idea. I hadn’t played with MAD, or efficiency fort that matter, but went and checked anyway. They’re at 50% and 80%, respectively. That’s where they were before this started happening.
The data at time of run was .27 crop ET, based on your soil moisture at start of day you went into deficit. Note there can be very slight differences in forecasts for the day, versus observations that we persist a day or two later. That is why it ran.
Now if you are also changing zone characteristics, those will affect historical data since we generate everything dynamically (for better or for worse) based on current zone characteristics.
"Watering because we should based on the soil moisture deficit and because we are allowed to based on FlexScheduleRules. WaterEntry=WaterEntry(date=2016-05-31T14:00:00.000Z, evapotranspiration=0.37, cropEvapotranspiration=0.27, irrigationEvents=[], effectiveRain=0.0, soilMoistureLevelAtStartOfDay=0.25, temperatureMin=75, temperatureMax=98, depletion=0.31, stationId=null, exposure=1.0, cropCoefficient=0.73, depthOfWater=0.96)
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For the better. That is a key to functional development right? Everything is a computation. No side effect code. I vote yay!